This happened a few years ago when I was in school. We were getting the first floor of our house constructed and it was half way completed, with only the basic framework of the walls and roof done.
One windy evening, our neighbor Manjula akka came up to our house looking a little scared. On asking her the reason, she exclaimed that she had apparently seen a monster (dyavva, in our local gul lingo) up on our terrace. We scoffed at the silly idea and told her she must have seen some laborer walking on the terrace and let her imagination run wild. She was adamant that she really had seen something huge and moving about on the terrace. She insisted that we come up to her place and take a look as it was clearly visible from her front door. Try as we might we could not convince her that it might be some worker. But then we remembered that all the workers had left for the day as it was quite late in the evening for them to continue their work in the dark. We assumed it might be somebody else taking a stroll on the terrace for there was a cool breeze in the evening. She mentioned that she initially had the same idea and had called out to that person on the terrace (thinking it might have been either my Dad or me) but there was no response from the person on the terrace and she suddenly had seen the thing/ person roll about very close to the edge of the terrace.
Now me and my aunt were really curious as to who would be wandering (or more precisely rolling about) up on the terrace. We decided to take a look and see what or who really was up there. My active imagination took over me and I decided that it would be a thief up there waiting for everyone to go to sleep, so that he could break into the house and make off with all the valuables. Well, I wasn’t going to let that happen, was I? I, who read the mystery stories and adventures of Famous Five, Hardy boys, Nancy Drew would catch this thief (if there was a thief).
So brimming with this self confidence we all went to her place to take a look at her so called monster. It was pretty dark on our terrace and we being in the light of her house could not really see anything at first. Then a little while later, we could see something huge move about on the terrace. It was a little too big to be anything human and rolled strangely, almost inhumanly. I felt really queasy, it was not the thief as I had imagined or even remotely human. As we kept staring at it, I transfixed at the strange sight and my aunt curiously, there was a gust of wind which set the monster rolling and we see our culprit clearly. We burst out laughing, because what we had presumed to be an inhuman thing was in fact inhuman and non-living too. It was a huge plastic bucket which had somehow gotten entangled with a big cement bag and ended up looking like a huge bulky person (or dyavva) as my neighbor had claimed.
I have a good laugh every time I remember this incident and my over active imagination running wild and conjuring up non-existent thief and monster. So much for reading the various mysteries and thinking I could be like one of those characters!!!
